Gregory's ServerThe orb itself was designed and built by a handful of people responsible for the actual Steam Deck hardware – some folks who work on the device itself and some who work primarily in the prototyping/fabrication workshop (and some Steam Deck clips made by an accessory designer on Reddit). The networking was a collab between people in the IT group and help from Steam networking (including a couple old retired switches from Steam and a rackmount case from an old Dota event).
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NDI is a standard developed by NewTek (the creators of the Video Toaster!) for sending streaming video around a LAN with low latency and good sync. It’s apparently used by a lot of modern planetariums, and megachurches, for example. We took the CAD file and did a quick spherical unwrap to know the approximate screen positions in a flat space, built that into a very wide and high res After Effects project to animate in, and then sent it back out to the orb as a single, tightly packed 4K video. The result was you could - either in semi-realtime in After Effects or with a rendered video - send motion graphics to the orb in realtime and then tweak it, and try again very quickly. It also meant doing things like adding rim lights to the Steam Deck in the center of the orb was as simple as drawing some rectangles in OBS. Here’s a video of the packed 4K grid streaming over to the orb in OBS: It meant we could capture some truly bananas footage lit entirely in-camera that both looked beautiful and really showcased the power of the displays in the new hardware (whether secretly or overtly, depending on if the viewer figured out what they were looking at). Also it meant we got to build a huge video orb, which I imagine is a life goal shared by many. You can see these videos at much higher res and also check out the Steam Deck at http://steamdeck.com  @ja2ke This makes me happy because you’re getting to do shit I know you love At what point did you inadvertently create Max Headroom? @SasquatcherGeneral we deliberately plugged a webcam in at some point pretty early on and the results were mostly a tangled mess because we never set it up to work with the packed grid to output in an organized way to the orb. But it was worth it all the same. And yes uh this was super fun to work on. @ja2ke Damn, that's so fucking cool! It would have been easy to just 3D-render the whole thing, but that would have taken a lot of the fun out of it. It's so great that Valve allowed for the resources to put this together. @ja2ke @ja2ke I have to ask, given ours (Whisker Squadron: Survivor) was one of the lucky games featured in these videos, why not name the games used either in the video itself or somewhere in the site? Attribution would have been nice @telarium I’m jealous of myself! During the production and shoot I spent most of the time anxious that it’d turn out looking like anything, or would miss the deadline. Now that it’s done, I’m nostalgic for this other version of me that made something rad.  @ja2ke I am now a big fan of the orb. But I must ask, can it be pondered? Was it pondered?  @ja2ke wow! this came together so fantastically, it was animated really well too, what a cool idea and presentation. i love shit like this @Dennis It was one 4K stream multicast out and everyone received it then cropped to their little square in OBS. We wrote a Python script that went down the line and modified each Deck’s OBS scene config to crop to the appropriate square in the template (and then crop in an additional pixel or two to reduce sub pixel bleed at the edges where you might see another screens image intrude a little). Meant each Deck was less than quarter res, but it was fine for the video where most are backgrounded. @Dennis For close-ups we ran a local full screen video in a new scene, instead of the stream. (The full screen game close-ups, and the final logo resolve.)  |
Software was maybe the most fun, because it wasn’t custom. Steam Deck is “just” a Linux PC in a tiny case, which meant we could use a bunch of existing solutions. We wanted to iterate quickly so ideally the whole thing would work in realtime (as opposed to rendering out individual videos per-screen and playing them in sync). So we ended up using OBS for the whole setup - both from the transmitting computer and running on each receiving Deck in the orb - with the NDI plugin for low latency sync.